Musepack is an audio compression format with a strong emphasis on high quality.

It's not lossless, but it is designed for transparency, so that you won't be able to hear differences between the original wave file and the much smaller MPC file.

It is based on the MPEG-1 Layer-2 / MP2 algorithms, but has rapidly developed and vastly improved and is now at an advanced stage in which it contains heavily optimized and patentless code.

MusePack is currently the preferred format for audiophiles and strongly recommended for everyone.

Try to use also MPC Batch Encoder. A Windows frontend for the MusePack encoder and decoder, for Tag and for ReplayGain.

What's New in This Release:

Fixes:
1. In some rare cases, the output file would have an incorrect duration (4 missing samples) when encoding some very long tracks.
2. There was a glitch at the end of the track when encoding from a 24-bit source through pipes.

Misc changes:
1. --xlevel is now used by default. Use --noxlevel to override (--longhelp shows the full command-line options).
2. Removed "Unstable/Experimental" flag writing. The encoder now stores the profile info like all stable versions do.

The new version has been tested on these CPUs: AMD K6-2, AMD Thunderbird, AMD Athlon XP1700+, Athlon 64, and a Pentium 4.